Furniture is one of the most intimate products any of us will acquire. We share our meals around it. We rock our babies in it. We furnish the places of our lives so our families will love returning home, so our friends will look forward to visiting.

None of us is aching to inherit our grandmother’s car or television, but her china cabinet would be a prized possession. Great furnitures creates, and carries, memories across time.

What makes one piece of furniture an heirloom while another remains humdrum?

Special design, painstaking craft and construction, a history. These lend permanence and meaning to what would otherwise be just an object.

Cross rails on cases are dovetailed into the ends to strengthen the case from side to side. On Mission designs, the dovetail is hidden from view. This joint is self-locking even without glue, and separation of the end panels is impossible, unless the wood is split apart.

Dowel joints rely on glue, and glue can fail over time. A dovetail joint cannot fail.

All bracket feet are splined, corner blocked and braced. In addition to the usual corner block, a corner brace is rabbeted into the side of the leg pieces. This leg is joined to the case by four screws, providing a solid foundation.

Four quartersawn solid white oak boards are mitered and then glued around a center post. This distinctive Leopold Stickley construction technique best displays the oak’s ray flake.

Simply gluing boards together to make a post yields an unsightly glue line and grain variation. Gustav Stickley achieved a similar effect with oak veneer. This feature is used in Mission styles exclusively.

The center guide keeps drawers from skewing sideways. Side suspension keeps drawers level when heavily loaded. No plastic parts to break. No metal to rust and scratch. Just honest to goodness hand craftsmanship. The drawer never scrapes the bottom, and opens and closes with ease… forever.

A signature element of Stickley construction is the tenon—a board whose ends have been cut for insertion into a mortise. A blind tenon is concealed within the mortise. A through tenon projects beyond the depth of the mortise.

Tenons, whether blind, through, pinned or keyed, are the very best way to join furniture together.

Resawing is a process of splitting thick lumber into thinner boards. The split halves are then opened like a book revealing identical grain. This painstaking process creates beautifully grained panels on all Stickley pieces it’s used on.

Making panels this way is more costly and more labor intensive, however, it is much more attractive than randomly matched boards.

A method of sawing oak so the cut is made parallel to the wood’s medullary rays instead of across. This cut yields a limited quantity of top grade boards featuring ray flake, and it binds the perpendicular fibers together, giving the oak its amazing strength.

Quartersawn white oak is much less likely to crack, check or warp than when it is flat sawn. This method is used in Mission style construction exclusively.

The side rails of some Stickley beds are locked into special casting. The end rails are mortised and tenoned into the posts and locked with wood pins. We use top quality 5/4″ solid oak, cherry and maple for bed rails.

Two panhead screws are positioned at the ends of each rail to fit into an iron casting with a tongued slot. Our beds won’t wobble or rock.